Land didn't just pull from continental philosophy, however. Part of what made his work so unique is the way he synthesized Marx's descriptions of capital's operating principles and internal logic — freed from Marx's angry, outraged moralism — with the Austrian School of Economics' economic insights — symmetrically freed from their ideological commitment to pretending that the outcomes of capital must always be positive for the humans trapped within the system. The only other thinker that I know of who does anything similar is Kevin Carson, but for very different reasons, mostly driven by his own moralism, and to very different ends (although reading both is highly recommended).
Marx's ideas are especially important for understanding Land. First we have the picture of money as a "real" (and alien) god over the worker:
Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man's products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man's operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable.
Then we have his ideas about capital accumulation through the circuit of productive capital:
The entire character of capitalist production is determined by the self-expansion of the advanced capital-value […]. Accumulation […] which appears as a means for constantly more expanded production of surplus-value — hence for the enrichment of the capitalist, as his personal aim — and is comprised in the general tendency of capitalist production, becomes later […] a necessity for every individual capitalist. The constant augmentation of his capital becomes a condition of its preservation.
And finally we have Marx's "[[ https://archive.org/stream/TheFragmentOnMachinesKarlMarx/The%20_Fragment%20on%20Machines_%20-%20Karl%20Marx_djvu.txt ][Fragment on Machines]]", from the Grundrisse, which is perhaps the most crucial text of all for Landian accelerationism.
There, Marx argues convincingly and at length that capital is heavily incentivized, almost required, to automate workers, since machines are more efficient, cheaper, and easier to control, and constitute ownable capital in themselves, whereas paying for labor-time is distasteful to capital; further, as a result of this, skill and strength in the process of production will be transferred from the human worker to the machine, with social knowledge on how to make things invested in the machine's mechanisms (or software, for modern machines) and social productive forces dedicated to making the machine more productive (stronger, faster, more reliable, more efficient) instead of the worker; as a result of this, the machine will cease to be just a tool for a worker, but something that has its own soul through its inhuman programmed/built machinic operating principles. This will lead to the worker ceasing to be the main actor, the primary and most important source of surplus-value and labor; instead, capital itself will labor and produce surplus-value; workers will become a mere conscious linkage, a watchman or regulator of the machine, and only so temporarily, for the things we haven't yet automated. The worker "steps to the side" of the production process rather than being its main agent. As Marx says,
The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour - of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself - which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.
Another important point that Marx makes in "Fragment" is that as capitalism develops, general social knowledge itself (of science, technology, organizational expertise) — described as the "general intellect" — will become the primary productive force of society, rather than just the physical labor of individuals. He argues this on the basis of the fact that machines are not just pieces of metal, they are "organs of the human brain, created by human hand": i.e., physical and active embodiments of the general intellect.
Of course, in this same essay, Marx argues that this tendency in capital will create new, and intensify old, contradictions within capital, bringing a potential for emancipation that he hopes would "inevitably" bring capitalism down; but as Deleuze and Guattari say, "no one has ever died of their own contradictions."
If he pulls from Marx so much, what does Land pull from the Austrian School? A surprising amount. Primarily and most importantly, the idea of the capitalist market as a massive distrubted information processing system, capable of processing far more information through its distributed network than any single human being could ever hope to manage (Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society"):
"We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function… The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.
[…]
Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has been found, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin.
There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen… If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it… the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system." (The Use of Knowledge in Society)
and making machinic economic calculations with it in a way more "rational" than any human institution (Misesian economic calculation problem) to dynamically respond to changing conditions:
"In an exchange economy the objective exchange value of commodities enters as the unit of economic calculation. This entails a threefold advantage. In the first place, it renders it possible to base the calculation upon the valuations of all participants in trade. The subjective use value of each is not immediately comparable as a purely individual phenomenon with the subjective use value of other men. It only becomes so in exchange value, which arises out of the interplay of the subjective valuations of all who take part in exchange. But in that case calculation by exchange value furnishes a control over the appropriate employment of goods. Anyone who wishes to make calculations in regard to a complicated process of production will immediately notice whether he has worked more economically than others or not; if he finds, from reference to the exchange relations obtaining in the market, that he will not be able to produce profitably, this shows that others understand how to make a better use of the goods of higher order in question. Lastly, calculation by exchange value makes it possible to refer values back to a unit. For this purpose, since goods are mutually substitutable in accordance with the exchange relations obtaining in the market, any possible good can be chosen. In a monetary economy it is money that is so chosen." (Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth)
motivating concreate physical action on the part of humans and corporate superorganisms in accordance with its will through incentives.
Moreover, markets for Land and the Austrians (especially Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Joseph Schumpeter) are not just homeostatic systems, calculating and responding to inputs in services of maintaining some preset state; instead, through the system of entrepreneurship, venture capital, and finance, it's constantly exploring the space of possiblities for growth, change, and expansion, constantly trying new solutions and options and Darwinianly pruning the ones that don't work while enhancing the ones that do.
Hayek says in his 1968 lecture Competition as a Discovery Procedure:
Competition is important as a process of exploration in which those who are better informed search for new possibilities that are also open to others… Competition is a procedure for the discovery of such facts as, without resort to it, would not be known to anyone, or at least would not be utilised.
Or, regarding "exploring the possibility space," we can quote Kirzner:
"The essence of the 'entrepreneurial' decision consists in grasping the knowledge which might otherwise remain unexploited." (Entrepreneurship and the Market Approach to Development)
"What is required is an alertness to the existence of opportunities that have been overlooked—because their continued existence must mean they have been overlooked." (Competition and Entrepreneurship)
Or, regarding "Darwinian pruning," we can quote Schumpeter, who coined the phrase "creative destruction" around precisely this concept:
"The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism." (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy)
We'll see how Land develops these ideas once we get to him.